Tuesday, March 03, 2009

I don't have anything to say about them, being uncharacteristically swamped, but Orin Kerr notes the posting at DOJ's site of various OLC memos by Yoo and Co. Prof. Kerr is unimpressed with the first one he examines; in the subsequent thread, commenters discuss how to immortalize "Yoo" as a pejorative; my favorite suggestion is for "a Yoo memo" to become slang for "a memo meant to tell the client he can do whatever he wants regardless of what the law says."

The way things are looking, that kind of slang term may be all the punishment John Yoo ever gets.

Just to recap: the last president believed that he had the inherent power to suspend both the First and the Fourth Amendments, he had the power to seize anyone in the US or world, disappear and torture them, and ordered his legal goons to come up with patently absurd legal rationales for all of it. And much of official Washington carried on as normal - and those of us who actually stood up and opposed this were regarded as "hysterics".